The road to syndication

Gift for hosting takes Helfrich on a public radio odyssey

November 16, 2001|By Raoul V. Mowatt, Tribune staff reporter.

Combining the spunk of a head cheerleader and the intensity of the class brainiac, Gretchen Helfrich has enjoyed a speedy trip from being a pledge-break volunteer at WBEZ-FM 91.5 who knew nothing about radio to host of "Odyssey."

Starting this month, she's trying to take the public-radio program about society, science, politics and the arts on a nationwide voyage into syndication, a higher profile for her and, hopefully, additional prestige for the station.

The 33-year-old's a little nervous.

"Odyssey" typically features two or three guests chatting with Helfrich on a given topic, followed by questions and comments from listeners. It airs live from noon to 1 p.m. weekdays.

"What interests me," she says, "is to see how things look from many different angles."

"It's not `Crossfire,' so people aren't yelling at each other," she adds. "I figure if you set a civil tone, people will be civil."

In recent episodes, Helfrich and guests have taken on topics ranging from the meaning of political labels to the relevance of feminism, the enduring allure of the Mona Lisa to the latest research on black holes. Her guests have included authors Salman Rushdie and Ana Castillo, state Sen. Barack Obama and Stanley Fish, dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"People always say, `If I had time, I'd like to read that book or learn about that.' But they don't have time," Helfrich says. "My job is to do all of those things. It's great."

Born in Maine and raised in Southern California, Helfrich comes from a family of seven children. She's something of a motormouth. She acknowledges she has to slow herself down on air so that people can fully understand her. "My mom said I started talking when I was nine months and I never stopped," she says.

Chicago at random

She never had designs on going into radio. She mulled over just about everything else, from being a lawyer to a linguist.

"I didn't spend too much time thinking about being a ballerina or a princess," Helfrich says. "There was a brief period in my childhood where I thought I would be a cruise director."

Helfrich is both a charm-school and Georgetown graduate.

After finishing college in 1989, she went to Florence, Italy, and taught English as a second language for about a year. But she decided she didn't have the patience for teaching, so she went to UCLA and studied linguistics, also for about a year. She quit before getting a degree.

Then, almost randomly, she decided to go to Chicago; she wanted to move somewhere none of her siblings had ever been and had heard good things about the the city.

Helfrich moved to Chicago in the summer of 1993, and temped for a number of firms as a receptionist or secretary. That fall, she decided to help WBEZ answer phones. She wanted to switch to working for WBEZ full time and applied for whatever jobs came open. One time, she got beaten out for an administrative position helping with fundraising. The woman who got the position is still there, she says, and occasionally asks her, "Aren't you glad you didn't get it?"

A `natural ability'

She eventually got hired as a producer for "Worldview" and filled in occasionally for host Jerome McDonald. "She just had this natural ability," says Torey Malatia, WBEZ's president and general manager. "She's very comfortable on air. . . . Whenever she was on air, she was great. I just knew she had this gift, that she could be a great host."

Her next big break came when Malatia decided to revamp the schedule in 1997 and was soliciting ideas. She pitched the idea of a show about ideas, one that gathered people around for a conversation.

Her show debuted in January 1998. "I just remember being very nervous and thinking I'd run out of questions," she says.

She didn't.

The day of a show, she is busy working with her producers on her intro and coming up with a list of questions for her guests.

"I end up walking a lot so it looks like I'm not doing anything, but I'm actually thinking," she says. "I find it's a good way to organize my thoughts."

Steve Edwards, host of WBEZ's "Eight Forty-Eight" program, describes Helfrich as a Type A achiever who's always prepping and thinking, who has an innate ability to challenge guests' premises and to get them to relay complex information in accessible ways.

Each of the 640 NPR stations decides independently whether it wishes to run a particular syndicated program. According to the Web site of the Public Radio Satellite Service, which distributes content to NPR stations, there are more than 79 syndicated programs available.